Organizations and individuals possess tremendous amounts of computing resources and often these resources are interconnected with one another over a network, such as the Internet. Resources may include storage devices, processing devices, memory devices, bandwidth devices, and the like. Many times a vast majority of these available resources are idle or under utilized. This has the potential of providing a tremendous opportunity to other network users whom at different times lack enough resources or have fully loaded resources which are not available to perform a desired task.
Unfortunately, organizations and individuals are unwilling to share or sell access to their idle or under utilized resources. This is so, because resource owners fear misuse of their resources, fear exposure of confidential information contained within environments of their resources, and fear exposing their resources during the process to third-party intruders and/or to electronic viruses.
The concerns of resource owners are well-founded with existing network communications. That is, just a single misuse of an owner's resources can have catastrophic effects for an individual or an organization. Moreover, because the Internet is a chaotic environment with the identities of users often feigned and information transmitted over public communication lines, existing techniques cannot guarantee that misuse will not occur.
A few techniques do exist to assuage concerns of resource owners and to provide some level of guarantees that misuse of resources will not occur. One conventional technique is to restrict access to dedicated networks that are not available to unauthorized users. This approach pretty much excludes using the Internet and taking advantage of its ease of access and pervasive connectivity. Moreover, this approach is expensive and often proves more expensive to the parties that desire to share resources than it would be to have the party that needs additional resources to just buy the needed additional resources. Another approach is to use Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). But, VPNs are reliant mostly on a user's identification and password, such that after these credentials are provided a user has access to the portal in any way that might be considered. Intruders often use these types of entry portals and known defects of the hosting machine (e.g., buffer overflow) to infiltrate a machine and its attendant network. Thus, the VPN itself presents security issues. Furthermore, VPNs require custom encryption, which needs supported within both environments of the parties sharing resources and which requires dedicated ports to be reserved, purchased, and set aside to support each different VPN. Thus, VPNs still pose a number of security risks and are also expensive and require human support to establish, maintain, and manage. Accordingly, VPNs have not resulted in pervasive sharing of idle and/or under utilized resources.
Therefore there is a need for improved allocation of resources over a network, such that idle or under utilized resources are securely shared over the network in a dynamic, trusted, and cost effective manner.